12/27/2011

In her short stories, Flannery O’Connor brings her characters to a moment of epiphany when it is no longer possible for them to return to the old ways of life.The proud are humbled, the ignorant are enlightened, and the hypocritical are forced to recognize that the discrepancy between their smug surface and its hollow spirituality is the proof of their inadequacy in the eyes of God.For O’Connor, this epiphanal moment can only be achieved by violence and destruction: “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace….We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in modern fiction, and it is always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and meant to be an end in itself.With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself.It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (“On Her Own Work”).

In the three stories we read (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), can you find any “moments of epiphany” which are produced in extreme violent situations? How do these violent situations “reveal” the hidden message of God? What mysterious transformations have the characters undergone when they are shocked into an awareness of their smug ignorance?

Famous for her rather eccentric and certainly unique literary style, O’Connor produced fiction in which the action of divine grace is worked in a mysterious and even grotesque way. Oftentimes, it is hard to understand the religious message that O’Connor tried to convey to her audience. However, in “On Her Own Works,” she explains to us the gist of her short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is "something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida." The fatal encounter between the character Grandmother and the serial killer “the Misfit”mysteriously allows the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul to take place. As O'Connor writes:

“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it…. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture….

I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become….

In such a picture, grace, in the theological sense, is not lacking. There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.”

Therefore, God works in a mysterious way. Like Manley Pointer in "Good Country People," the Misfit is not ridiculed by his creator. O'Connor suggests that the grandmother's "moment of grace" might induce the Misfit to be reborn too. It is possible that the Misfit has been transformed by his mysterious experience with the grandmother.

12/03/2011

Questions for your assignment (choose one from the following questions and answer it with 250-300 words):1. At the end of "Recitatif," how does Twyla's and Roberta's exploration of the "truth" of what they had seen at St. Bonny's many years earlier affect your sense of the "truth" of later episodes in the story? Is either Twyla or Roberta more reliable than the other?

2. For you, what's the message of this story?

3. Why does Morrison use Maggie--a crippled, mute, deaf old man--as the focus of Twyla's and Roberta's obsession in this story? Toward the end of the story, Twyla says: "Maggie was my dancing mother?" What are the possible implications of this remark?

11/23/2011

Questions for your assignment (choose one from the following questions and answer it with 250-300 words):

1. The subtitle of this story is "A Tale for Children." Why and how does this seem like an apt description? an inapt or ironic one?

2. How do the various characters interpret the winged man? How do they arrive at their interpretations? What might their interpretations reveal about them? about people and/or the process of interpretation in general?

3. Why do so many people at first come to see the winged man and later stop doing so? Why is Elisenda so relieved when he finally flies away? What insights into human behavior might be revealed here?

10/20/2011

In "Araby" and "Eveline," sense perceptions--sight, sound, touch, smell--play an important role in the development of the psychological impacts and the emotional nuances of the stories. James Joyce elicits sensuous responses from the readers by making us actively engage with the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of the settings of the stories. Look for the descriptions of different senses in the two stories and analyze their implications or connotations. Use 250-300 words to respond this question.

In Tuesday's class, we discussed Maupassant's champion of the realist approach to writing and his elimination of the moral judgements and long digressions used by many earlier writers. He once comments that the serious writer's goal "is not to tell us a story, to entertain or move us, but to make us think and to make us understand the deep and hidden meaning of events."

Questions for your assignment (choose one from the following questions and answer it with 250-300 words):

1) For you, what is "the deep and hidden meaning of events" that happen in "The Jewelry"?

2) Once the secret of Madame Lantin's jewelry is revealed, what details from earlier in the story take on a different significance?

3) The heroine of "The Jewelry" remains nameless throughout the story. We merely see things from her husband's point of view. If she were given a chance to tell her story, what would that be?

10/03/2011

Excerpt: "The Use And Abuse of Literature"

by Marjorie Garber

Literature Then and Now

But what is the use of literature? Does it make us happier, more ethical, more articulate? Better citizens, better companions and lovers? Better businesspersons, better doctors and lawyers? More well-rounded individuals? Does it make us more human? Or simply human? Is what is being sought a kind of literary Rolodex, a personal Bartlett's Familiar Quotations of apt literary references ("To be or not to be?" "Only con­nect"; "Do I dare to eat a peach?")—phrases that can be trotted out on suitable occasions, at the dinner table, or on the golf course? Such literary taglines or touchstones were once a kind of cultural code of mutual recognition among educated people—but their place has long been taken by references from ﬁlm, video, TV, rock music, advertising, or other modes of popular culture. Is literature something that everyone should study in the same way that we should study other basic cultural facts about the world we live in, like the history of art or the history of music, studying them all in one fell swoop, in survey courses or general introductions or appreciations?

Why read literature? Why listen to it on audiotapes or at poetry slams or at the theater? Why buy it? And even if you enjoy reading literature, why study it?

What do we mean by literature today, when the term is used by medi­cal and technical professionals to mean "instructional brochures" and by social scientists to mean "a survey of academic research"? "Please send me the latest literature on your new headache drug" or "your most recent software" or "your latest cell phone." "Enclosed you will ﬁnd a review of the literature on gender discrimination in higher education." Indeed, the relationship between literature and litter, though not ety­mologically correct, seems seductively close. (This homology, in fact, occurred to Jacques Lacan, who attributed it to James Joyce.) Litera­ture is, all too often, pieces of paper we should consult for expertise but often simply toss in a drawer or in the trash.

To overschematize a little for the sake of argument, let us say that there are two poles in the debate over the "use" or "value" of litera­ture. One pole is utilitarian or instrumental: the idea that literature is good for you because it produces beneﬁcial societal effects: better citi­zens, for example, or more ethically attuned reasoners. The other pole might be characterized as ecstatic, affective, or mystical: the idea that literature is a pleasurable jolt to the system, a source of powerful feeling that—rather like Judge Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about pornography—is unmistakable even if undeﬁnable. (For Stewart's "I know it when I see it," we could substitute "I know it when I read it / hear it.") Emily Dickinson's "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry" is perhaps the best-known expression of this view. It's worth quoting the longer passage from which this sentence is excerpted, since it makes the point even more vividly:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no ﬁre can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

The poet A. E. Housman offered a similar somatic test:

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

For Housman, a noted classical scholar who prized the intellect, poetry was nonetheless "more physical than intellectual." Other symptoms he reported included "a shiver down the spine," "a constriction in the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes," and a sensation in the pit of the stomach that he likened to a phrase from Keats, when "every­thing . . . goes through me like a spear." Although these symptoms may sound painful, Housman clearly associates them with a singular kind of pleasure.

So, once again: "feels good" or "is good for you." Both of these desid­erata, we might think, are covered by Horace's Ars Poetica, with its cel­ebrated advice that poetry should be "dulce et utile," its aims to delight and to instruct.

A latter-day "Ars Poetica"—one too often dismissed these days—is the popular poem by Archibald MacLeish, with its two famous and quotable pronouncements:

A poem should be equal to: Not true. And

A poem should not mean But be.

These precepts, so perfectly attuned to close reading and New Critical thinking, also embody a sentiment elegantly summarized by Keats when he wrote, "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket." Yet some of the best literature, whether poetry or prose, has been polemi­cal, political, and/or religious (not always in an orthodox way; think of Blake, whose Jerusalem hymn is, ironically, sung in churches all over Britain). Some of the novels of Dickens (the Brontës, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Cervantes, Flaubert) have had palpable designs for political, social, or moral change, as have the great epics, from those by Homer and Virgil to those by Milton and Joyce. This palpable design of epic is the gloriﬁcation of nationalism and empire; Wordsworth's personal epic, The Prelude, acknowledges the boldness of using such a public genre for chronicling "the growth of a poet's mind." But MacLeish's poem is a poem about poems. Paradoxically, this witty, sensuous verse about what poetry should not do—it should not "mean," it should not be taken as true—has been read both as a truism and as an explanation of a poem's proper "meaning."

Before we leave the questions of whether and how literature can be good for you, we should perhaps note that in the matter of whether works of ﬁction should model—or inculcate—virtue and morality, "good for you" and "bad for you" have the same status. Both are judgmental and moral. These effects may be claimed or discerned by preachers or censors or even by the courts. But they are incidental and accidental by-products of literature, not literary qualities. In The Art of Fiction, Henry James queried the whole category of the morality of the novel: "Will you not deﬁne your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the wid­est sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair . . .

The only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is . . . that it be interesting."

Excerpted from The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber. Copyright 2011 by Marjorie Garber. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Course Description: This class will introduce students to fiction, poetry, and drama and open up a complex field of interpreting and analyzing literature.While the first semester focuses on fiction, the second semester will focus on poetry and drama.We will learn how to approach literature as a distinctive genre with its own specifications and acquaint ourselves with the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the texts.The concern of this class is to engage literature with a critical eye and to introduce students to the complex interactions of region, gender, race, class, and narrative technique.Some basic knowledge of critical theory and its terminology will also be introduced as a preparation for further study.

Required Text:

The Norton Introduction to Literature (Shorter 10th Edition)—to be purchased at the University Bookstore (main campus)

Course Requirements:

Class Prep: You are expected to finish the reading assignments before each class meeting.

2.Attendance: Attendance is mandatory; you are responsible for coming to class on time.Excessive and consistent lateness will also harm your grade.I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences. You will automatically fail the course if you miss more than 2 classes.If you must be absent for an extended period of time, you must consult with me to determine the best alternative for completing the course.

Oral Report: Two students as a group will be assigned one text for your group report.In the report, you have to introduce the biographical information of the author, summarize the plot of the story, analyze the main characters, and select passages that play crucial roles in the whole development of the story.I encourage creative presentation ideas.You are expected to present in front of the class, ready to take questions.

Midterm and final exams: Remember, there will be no make-up exams.Missing the exams will result in failing the course.

Blog entries: You are expected to submit 10 blog entries throughout the semester.Deadlines will be announced on the blog:http://literarycollage.blogspot.com/